We will use this icon to mark check points.
A check point is a way for you to check how you are doing.

For most of the steps in this tutorial we will
provide the code as it should look after the task. It is tempting, we
know, but please, please, do not go for the “copy&paste” way.

We will use this icon to challenge you
with additional code-related tasks so you can go further at your own
pace. No inline answer will be provide for those challenges but we will
give you some guidelines and tips. By the way, within the instructions
we will use an italic font to refer to variables and pieces of code.

We will use this icon to ask you some questions related to the task your are working on.

Additional info and resources - this is not essential to complete the tutorial, but very interesting.

Tips that might help you on this task.

If you are following this tutorial as part of a workshop, do not hesitate to
raise your hand and share any questions or comments you may have.
If you are doing it by your own, you still can raise your hand in our
mailing list, just join our Google Group.

This page will help you prepare your computer for work with BioJS

You will need to work in a terminal using npm and git.
* Git is a version control system that will keep track of the changes you have made in code.
* Node.js is a ‘runtime environment platform for server-side JavaScript applications’.
Node’s package managing system is called npm.

Open your terminal of choice and check whether you have npm, git, and node installed. You should run these without
any error.

Mac OSX

On Mac we recommend installing git and node.js via Homebrew. Homebrew is called the ‘missing package manager for OS X’.
It allows you to download packages onto your Mac from your command line.
Homebrew, git and node.js are packages worth having if you want to do software development on your Mac.

Windows

Windows is definitely not the preferred operating system for software development of this kind. So some additional
and often unexpected effort will probably be necessary to get everything running.
Be warned that some packages just assume that they have a UNIX-like environment. So consider using Linux or Mac OS if you have choice.

If you don’t have a choice or want to try anyway, installing git and npm on windows is still easy:
Just download & install using the Windows installer for node and git.

After installation, you can use the Git Bash terminal for both npm and git commands in a UNIX-like environment.

Another possibility would be the Cygwin terminal emulator.
This allows you to install git via a package manager. Please beware that node and npm don’t support Cygwin at the moment.
However you can still use it through Cygwin after installing node via it’s installer or building an older version (< 4.2.2) from source.